At least O.J. sold pizzas

Last week gave us a rare glimpse into what we may be in for if/when UFOs decide to assert themselves over one of planet Earth’s largest cities in broad daylight. Predictably, it’s pretty much the same way we cover — or don’t cover — more complicated or pedestrian matters.

Before “it’s the jobs, stupid” became this season’s election-year mantra, it was all about the real-estate crisis and before that it was health care. Neither of those issues sneaked up on Uncle Sam and bit him in the ass. A lot of smart people saw these train wrecks coming and were screaming bloody murder. But how do you tell these stories in two minutes? Where’s the movement? Where’s the action, the thigh, the cleavage?

Leave it to media coverage of UFOs to trivialize words like ‘panic’/CREDIT: youngcons.com

This is why news departments like to interrupt regularly scheduled programming with extended skycam coverage of high-speed freeway chases whose news value evaporates the moment the perp gets hog-collared. But it doesn’t even have to be a NASCAR knockoff. O.J. Simpson going 55 mph sold more delivery pizzas in Los Angeles in 1994 than the Lakers did when they beat Boston this summer. But this has been hideously obvious for decades.

What seemed different, at least for one news cycle, was the way the media pounced all over the UFOs-above-Manhattan thing last Wednesday. Thanks to stills and footage of New Yorkers pointing skyward at bright objects suspended in the afternoon sky, what passes for the Fourth Estate acted like Orson Welles working the Mercury Theater microphone on Halloween 1938.

All right. De Void’s so old school, when it comes to panic, De Void tends to think Port-Au-Prince earthquake and Banda Aceh tsunami and monsoon flooding in Pakistan and bombs going off in a Kandahar marketplace. But truthfully, the childish part of De Void that doesn’t care how the media gets there so long as it gets there will admit to being mildly bummed (not surprised) when schoolkids the next day admitted their helium-filled birthday party balloons had gotten away from them on Wednesday.

But that explanation didn’t stop an El Paso TV station, two days later, from speculating that the same UFOs had moved south to Texas. Without a hint of sarcasm, one of the anchors compared the Manhattan images to night footage of what turned out to be skydivers at a local air show. Urging viewers to check out the triangle pattern, he added, “I gotta tell ya, they do look eerily similar.”

Yeah, for awhile there everybody wanted to score points off that 10/13/10 UFO moment, including skeptic Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait, blogging for Discover magazine. Plait took a legitimate swipe at a New York reporter who revisited the scene later that evening with a photographer and wondered aloud if they had just filmed the UFOs’ return. Plait suspected it was Jupiter instead. “All it would’ve taken to fix this whole thing,” he wrote, “was a single phone call to an astronomer. The story would’ve still been fun and playful, but it also would’ve been accurate and had real science in it.”

Roger that: Call an astronomer like Plait for “real science” and all our UFO problems will go away. Well, the media’s gone away again and probably won’t come back until the next video rolls around. In the meantime, De Void still clings to a make-believe world where media, policy-level, and grass-roots debates over what to do next will spring from things called books — like Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.

9 comments on “At least O.J. sold pizzas”

The media looked pretty bad in all this. To get the NYC/El Paso comparison, Channel 9 had to ignore the part of the NYC video that pulled back from the three balloons to show five. But you can’t have a five-cornered triangle UFO, can you? So…go with the better story.
The online UFO enthusiasts looked bad as well. Suddenly, everyone is am expert on balloon aerodynamics. Reading these comments, you will believe a balloon cannot fly or reflect light. If you read the comments sections on the Golden Knights blog pages about the event, you’ll see numerous people hotly denying the light effects in the parachute jump were possible. Insane.

You have gotta’ love those elementary school kids!
I do agree 100% with PurrlGurrl. I used to live in South Florida 10 years ago. Rick Sanchez would come on the air, warning of the mayhem just off the shore during hurricane season. Those alerts certainly helped to clear bread, milk, bottled water and cigarettes to fly off the shelves at super markets. Thankfully, most of time Rick was bluffing.
My faith in anything said by astronomers was blown away when Neil deGrasse Tyson gave Pluto the broom. Freakin’ party poopers…

What part of “didn’t we just hear from these folks?” don’t you understand? They…controled the media to tell us that jet fuel fires flatten the world trade centers…and look at the ballons over New York City….for HOURS!
Please give us a little credit…or use baby oil next time.

This is no different than the 10-second teasers about impending weather disasters aired throughout the evening so that we’ll tune in at 11:00 (only to discover all that panic mongering was about a 10% chance of thunderstorms that might be associated with damaging winds in one or two remote areas). But they hooked us and we tuned in like the sheep we are.

We possibly were witnessing some kind of critical mass response, where a rapid occurrence of certain multiple random events is perceived as clear evidence of a trend of related phenomena to be recognized and responded to. Hawking, Kean’s book, Hastings’ news conference, the Royal Society symposium, and…? So the scene was set for a media overreaction to the next random UFO event, which just happened to be the Manhattan sightings.
Hope it isn’t all part of an actual “Silly Season” plot to lull the media into a surfeited rejection of any more new UFO stories- like the one about arrival of their invasion fleet.